On Jun 19, 2014, at 5:07 PM, Nico Williams <nico at cryptonector.com> wrote:
> More seriously, this is a rather meta issue. Since we're committed to
> markup now, we should do as the Romans in Rome. We should have the
> courage of conviction to follow this commitment through.
I don't know what it means to mark a block of text normative, and I don't even know what it means to mark a word normative. If you want to do this kind of markup, you need to say what it means for text to be marked normative, for keywords to be marked normative, and for text not to be marked normative, and for keywords not to be marked normative.
The idea that this can be something that the RFC editor does is, no offense to the RFC editor, absurd. This would require a new BCP that updates RFC 2119. The fact that we can't even agree on whether "must" is normative strikes me as pretty clear evidence that this is not something that can just be decided by fiat.